If I were to borrow some terminology from the colorful NNT, I would say that the CFA exam resides in extremistan -for a occurence of a rare event could derail our chances of acing this beyoch… For lvl2, such events are PM and alternative assets, only a small % of the rubric but ignore them and you 'll be studying them again next year. Gee, i am burned out…
The year I took L2 was the year of the Treynor-Black WTF?? event. I was expecting PM to be one of my strongest suits. It wasn’t. But I still passed. It turned out that although PM was an unexpected b!tch, some of the other sections were easier than I expected. So it can still balance out well. Remember that as test day draws near, people tend to freak out about the parts that they are weakest on. If you have prepared well, the amount of stuff you DO know for the exam is actually harder to observe. Being nervous is good - it keeps you on your toes - but being too fearful is counterproductive, especially with seven weeks left to prepare.
Treynor-Black almost killed me
am i being too optimistic when reading all these treynor black horror stories if i think that it was a rare event and cfa institute realized that ppl are going to bomb such tiny minute topics like that–therefore, something like that will probably not happen again?
Yes. Case in point, the next year at the same level - balance of payments (BOP) and PM.
lol dammit. what were the tricky BOP and PM Q?
I don’t even remember now. It was just the fact that you only got ONE econ vingette and, with triangular arb, parity relationships, internation capm and all the other stuff avaliable, we got BOP instead. PM was just crazy hard. I don’t even want to try to remember it.
I know it’s a bit pointless but you realy have wonder wtf the Institute thinks it is doing by setting exams like that. I mean really, why would you set an exam which is either partly so f’ing hard that nobody knows what is going on or is so f’ing obscure that nobody knows what is going on. What’s the point? How does that accurately measure the ability of someone to master 3,000+ pages of material? Why not just set an exam which touches on most topics, which is still hard and challenging, but at least doesn’t sucker punch you with crap like detailed BOP or Treynor-Black questions. I’m pretty sure you could set a very hard L2 exam using 20 vignettes without having to resort to tricks.
Remember that you don’t need a perfect score to pass. Traditionally, you can get 30% of the answers wrong and still pass, perhaps even more.
…Then again if you somehow manage to bomb an entire section (not that difficult to do based on my personal track record with alternative assets and PM) then there is no chance of passing the test. And that is precisely the meaning of a black swan. It turns its black a$$ up, and kaboom you is damned to fail… :(((
In defense of the CFAI, they do give you all the LOSs and basically tell you what could potentially be on the exam.
if they just tested the DDM and all the other easy formulas and concepts, it wouldn’t be very difficult. what’s the point. the test is designed to see who can think straight and succeed in a stressful environment. its not all about the content. if thats what you’re looking for, go get an mba in finance where you can still attain the degree with a grade of b-.
The test is hard, but extremistan is, well… too extreme.